Skip to content(if available)orjump to list(if available)

Occult books digitized and put online by Amsterdam’s Ritman Library

dr_dshiv

A good place to start is Cornelis Agrippa’s “Three Books on Occult Philosophy.” Agrippa was a lawyer and esoteric feminist (eg, he wrote “on the nobility and preeminence of the female sex”) and defended women accused of witchcraft throughout Europe. His “three books” gave birth to the “occult” nomenclature.

Or my favorite, Marsilio Ficino. There is a statue to Ficino when you walk into the library. Ficino was hired by Cosimo Medici (the Florentine who invented banking and funded much of the Florentine renaissance) to translate Plato and other esoteric books coming from the fall of Constantinople. He published “De Mysteriis” in 1497, which paraphrases neoplatonic understanding of Gods, Demons, Heroes and Soul — arguing that gods and demons don’t feel — indeed, not even the soul (“the lowest of the divines”) has any part that feels.

(Aside: This idea was actually referenced in “K Pop Demon Hunters,” where they debate whether demons can feel — or are “all feelings”)

It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

In any case, there are many old ideas and nuggets of wisdom that have yet to be mined and discovered— don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books! We might need AI for that…

ryandv

> It is an old Pythagorean tradition that sensation or consciousness arises out of the interaction of the immaterial soul and the material body. That “three world” idea is echoed by Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose in his book “Road to Reality.” He talks about how the material world produces the world of consciousness which produces the world of ideas (including mathematics), which seems to produce the material world…

You see this idea echoed in Hermetic Qabalah as the "Four Worlds" - the world of action & physical materiality, the world of psychology, thought, feeling, & egoic consciousness, the world of creativity, and the world of archetypal abstraction.

The Hermetic influence comes from the assertion that the three immaterial worlds of the "soul" or "mind" (synonyms with the same referent) are in some sense equal to, or at least intertwined with, the material body, in a mutually reciprocal dance: "As above, so below; as below, so above."

For some 20th century texts in this neighbourhood: The Three Initiates' primer on occult studies The Kybalion, Dion Fortune's Mystical Qabalah, and the classic Qabalistic reference: Liber 777 by Crowley (or its updated, more legible version, Liber 776 1/2 by Eshelman). The works of Israel Regardie such as The One Year Manual or The Middle Pillar are also good for grounding occult studies in more psychological or psychotherapeutic language which is a good moderating influence when experimenting with pretty out-there material.

Be careful with the meaning of words in this field.

zoogeny

I think your description of Penrose's belief does not match a podcast I recently watched where he discusses these topics with the Christian apologist William Lane Craig [1]. In fact, he explicitly states early on in that video that he sees the world of ideas as primary as opposed to Craig's view that consciousness is primary.

At any rate, this video might serve as a quick introduction to Penrose's three world idea for those interested.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wLtCqm72-Y

dr_dshiv

Oh, cool! I don’t recall a “primary” in the book — he suggests a range of different possible configurations that he was open to. What struck you as not matching?

Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…

zoogeny

I was considering your explicit "material -> conscious -> ideas -> material" description. It feels more correct when you say he considers a range of possibilities that connect these, not explicit causality.

My take away was that he sees a mystery in the connections between these things (physical world, consciousness, ideas) that hints at some missing ideas in our conceptions of these things. But he clearly wants to avoid that mystery allowing what he calls out as "vague" answers to the question (mostly religious dogmatic certainties).

throwanem

All life also defecates, intelligent or otherwise. Curious how no one hastens to canonize that for its ubiquity.

ryandv

> Personally, I do think that the immaterial world of ideas must be primary—at least certain aspects of mathematics seem so necessary that they’d be discovered by intelligent life, no matter the galaxy… or simulation…

For some speculative philosophical fiction that explores related ideas I highly recommend Neal Stephenson's Anathem.

Anon84

If you're looking for a physical version, the latest translation by Eric Purdue is exceptionally well researched and documented: https://amzn.to/4ly4wTf

Archelaos

> don’t think for a moment that scholars have read all these books!

Umberto Eco probably did.

jrussino

This sounds like the premise for a fun sci-fi/horror move. Uh-oh; we accidentally trained GPT6 on the Necronomicon!

modeless

Nous Research already trained an occult model: https://x.com/Teknium1/status/1710505270043189523

grues-dinner

Now to pit it in debate against Magisterium, the Catholic AI: https://www.magisterium.com/

literalAardvark

You jest, but that's already a pretty decent Buffy the vampire slayer episode

GuinansEyebrows

one of my favorites!

duxup

Distantly like the story about Rationalists where some went from referencing "demons" to believing the occult is real.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877076

null

[deleted]

wrp

I wonder how Terry Pratchett would have dealt with magical e-books? The goings on at the library of Unseen University were some of my favorite parts of Discworld.

grimgrin

aside, my kindle is named: "Octarine Fairy" -- hardly fitting, except it's a book and I adore discworld

https://wiki.lspace.org/Octarine_Fairy_Book

WJW

That is a very cool name for a kindle. Never stop believing in dragons! You could actually make them extinct that way.

rpastuszak

I can't recall the title, but a friend was recommending to me a book in this genre. I'm probably misremembering, but here you go: a detective agency using an artificial intelligence to conjure demons.

rpastuszak

Seems like another commenter found the author/books I was thinking about: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44915297

ted_bunny

Honestly you can't get much out of GPT-666* except the most boilerplate sigils, and then you run the risk of cross-imbuement and well, now you got demons. Do you want demons? Because that's how you get demons.

Dilettante_

I've quite improved my results by telling it to purify and circumambulate its ritual space a few times in my user prompt. I've also been dabbling with reasoning, but so far what feels like 80% of sessions get possessed within 2 reasoning steps.

RajT88

New season of Evil Dead. Either way, I'd watch it.

gtsnexp

This is revolutionary. In my youth, I traveled through old libraries in Germany, collecting microfilm of Paracelsus’s works. Online availability could reshape the study of the early history of chemistry, metallurgy, and physics.

“Occult philosophy” is just the lens medieval societies used to make sense of the natural world.

asimpletune

The book club I do with my friends maintains a list of resources such as the one in the article. I would greatly appreciate it if anyone would take a look and suggest anything we should add.

https://b00k.club/resources/

perfectbeeing

Would this be reasonable material on which to fine tune the new Gemma 3 270M model?

Disposal8433

Half of the occult books are talking about magic and irrelevant stuff. The other half is philosophy and spirituality hidden behind materialistic concepts (think Freemasons for example).

All those books would most likely be useless or detrimental for LLMs I guess.

literalAardvark

More than useful for running a d&d campaign

gtsnexp

Thinking of a RAG with the entire Ritman library collection as a GM.

dr_dshiv

Most of the books are the outcomes of the Renaissance. The relationship between “science” and spirituality was much closer then than now.

Further, most books published in Europe between 1300-1700 were written in Neo-Latin. Most of these books, therefore, have not been digitized and translated.

Now, to me, it seems like a real shame if this humanist core of European thought is deemed too dangerous for consumption. But it wouldn’t be the first time. The library behind these works, the Biblioteca Philosophica Hermetica, specializes in books banned by various church authorities.

I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training. The renaissance, esoteric though it may be, deserves to be part of the diversity of thought used to train LLMs.

We can easily imagine an AI apocalypse - maybe these books might even help us imagine an AI renaissance…

zozbot234

> I personally believe that these materials should definitely be part of large model training.

Already done: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37752272 It turns out that the real safety risk with AI is not Mecha-Hitler, it's just that it might end up reading the wrong sorts of books and accidentally conjure a horde of demons.

pelasaco

> books banned by various church authorities

A book that "explains why" the church is still against it, is the Anti-christian conspiracy, Msgr. Henri Delassus, 1911 (I guess)

TheAceOfHearts

I love the art aesthetic of occult texts, but browsing through all these books just to find any hidden gems or interesting artwork seems really tedious. At least browsing through the list with the title pages visible shows a few interesting designs. Can't really get much more out of this because most of the texts are unreadable to me. This might be a good use case for agentic AI, to browse through the books and highlight any artwork that's hidden beyond the first page.

For alchemy, I was recently learning about alchemical symbols and sigils, but quickly found out that pretty much all the interesting material from this era and category has been preserved, while all the ugly or uninteresting variants tend to get dropped. Unicode has a category for alchemical symbols and they just preserved what seems to be the best parts. Shout-out to U+1F756, the Alchemical Symbol for Horse Dung 🝖.

Whenever I visit a major news publication with dedicated artists handling the creation of hero images, I often end up taking a bit of time to contemplate each design decision and exploring any symbolic interpretation. The best publications have a way of perfectly communicating the underlying tone and message of an article just from the hero image. The Atlantic tends to have the most creative hero images, while The Economist has the most interesting cover designs. And yet, despite this expertise, I never see people remark on those little delights, which in a way makes it occult while hiding in plain sight. It feels a bit connected, seeing the artwork in the first page of these books; maybe an invitation with the whispers of the kind of message the authors wished to convey.

giraffe_lady

I have a cook friend who uses a subset of the alchemical symbols for labeling in his home kitchen, which I've always thought was fun. Most of them aren't applicable but a lot of the kitchen basics have symbols: oil, salt, vinegar, sugar, baking soda a few others I'm forgetting.

popalchemist

For those who don't know, this is the best digital library of Occult/Alchemical texts in existence.

chrisstanchak

Very cool, but I don't see a way to download. Currently have ChatGPT Agent Mode translating one from latin, but a tedious process.

riazrizvi

No doubt these were instruments part of some scheme to make a living, and the context in which they were used is no longer available.

I love to see how names of famous Romans and Greeks were reused to give them credence. I bet they used lots of other techniques listed by Cialdini in Influence.

baobabKoodaa

Can anyone link a torrent? Would be nice to preserve this collection.

heikkilevanto

Looks like wonderful material to feed any AI crawler that accesses the forbidden part of my site.

heelix

Oh man, these are absolutely going to improve our DnD props.

rook_line_sinkr

thought the same thing, texting my DM right now ':D

Jonovono

Somewhat related, but I randomly got suggested this video on Youtube when it only had a couple hundred views. He's turned it into a series, and I have quite enjoyed it. Somehow bridges user interfaces and occult stuff haha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGpBQgZ5IsI&list=PLsfH1Ahi4S...

rpastuszak

Check out https://futureofcoding.org if you haven't. When I watched Liber Indigo, my first thought was that it would be a great intro to the type of problems that community is messing with*.

* future of computing, esoteric/future interfaces etc...

wsintra2022

I read the book also and found it to be a delightful experience

fnordlord

This is great, thanks. I've been going down a real rabbit hole on Thelemic magic and this really brings it back, full circle, to something I actually do understand.